The surface/interface group at the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics (LICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has published a critical review entitled Extreme wettability and tunable adhesion: biomimicking beyond nature？in Soft Matter at the invitation of the journal. The article has been consecutively assessed as the top ten most read articles of the journal in December, 2011 and January, 2012

Materials with special wettability and adhesion have attracted much attention since they can be applied in anti-fouling, anti-icing, separation of water and oil, controllable cell adhesion, drag reduction in liquid transportation, corrosion inhibition, micro-fluidic devices, etc.

The surface/interface group has long been engaged in the field and achieved a series of scientific results. Their work has been published in Soft Matter (3 papers), Langmuir, J. Colloid. Interf. Sci., Appl. Phys. Lett., ACS Appl. Mater. Interf., Chem. Commun. and J. Phys. Chem. C.

The review is a summary of the work in materials with extreme wettability and adhesion in recent years. It first introduces the development of surfaces with special wettability. The development can be roughly divided into three stages. During the first stage, people have studied the special wettability in nature and the rules of the properties. In the second phase, people have fabricated surface with specialwettabiltiy by mimicking nature species. In the third stage, researchers have achieved some special surface properties that nature does not have. It is called “biomimicking beyond nature” by the researchers.

In the second part, the review focuses on surface wetting behavior beyond nature, namely switchable wettability between(super)hydrophobicity and (super)hydrophilicity, switchable water/oil droplet adhesion betweensuperhydrophobic pinning states and superhydrophobic rolling states, superoleophobicity at the air–solid interface or even under vacuum, and self-healing (super)amphiphobicity at the air–solid interface.

Finally, the problems and challenges in the field are pointed out and research prospects are addressed.

Hopefully, the review can be of help to researchers engaged in surfaces with special wettability and adhesion.